Tuesday, 19 April 2016

I wrote the following piece from Los Angeles for the Financial Times. It appeared in the FT, in somewhat more restrained form, on 27 February 1999. The hardest part was getting accredited, for some reason they didn't quite believe I came from London, or wrote for the FT, or maybe both. But there I am, about four rows back; you can see me more clearly in the second photo, below left. And by the way, the FT didn't use that title for the piece.

The OJ Simpson Circus was back in action in Hollywood last week, when
property from the former football star’s residence was auctioned off on
behalf of a Court Receiver, one step in obtaining the $33.5 million
judgement levied against Simpson by a Santa Monica jury in the civil
suit brought by the families of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman. This
being LA, the receiver, Michael D. Myers, came complete with a
four-page biographical press release, describing himself as “slim
and soft-spoken”.

Sadly, the slim and soft-spoken Mr. Myers went overlooked by the local media, for whom otherwise it was
Christmas in February. Hollywood auctioneers Butterfield &
Butterfield on Sunset Boulevard overflowed with 17 film crews
jostling, 12 reporters pouting, 8 live-vans transmitting, and 5
panicked PRs. All it was missing was Dominick Dunne as the partridge
in the front row.

The top item on offer was OJ’s 1968 Heisman Trophy, awarded by the
New York Athletic Club to America’s outstanding college gridiron
player, and made more valuable because the Club misspelled Athletic
on the inscription. Beyond
the contents of his trophy room, the sale also provided a rare look
into the aesthetic sensibilities of the football star turned Hertz pitchman and Naked Gun actor. Tiffany
style lamps, chocolate box tourist paintings, and a large
proto-cubist head painted by Donna Summer all gathered more action
than many of the sports items.

The crush of media necessitated a second room for buyers and the
curious public, including those desperate for their 15 seconds of
fame. Hogging the centre ring of the circus was one Bob Enyart, a
right-wing radio host from Denver, who orchestrated a TV camera scrum
by announcing he would destroy the three items he purchased in a ceremony on
the steps of the LA courthouse the next day at high noon. Enyart
claimed to be acting for “citizens frustrated with the American
justice system that allowed a criminal to remain as President and a
murderer to go free.” Meanwhile, he frantically plugged his
web-site, which turned out to be hawking “I Helped Execute OJ
Simpson” T-shirts for a mere $200 a pop. As it turned out,
Enyart’s OJ exorcism was exiled to the “and finally” item on
the next night’s news.

Other buyers included wealthy souvenir seekers like Marty Cohen, who
dropped out of the Heisman bidding at $220,000 “when rationality
took over” and, more predictably, sports collectors, like Mark
Dalen. Dalen came from Michigan, wearing proudly a huge Super Bowl
winners’ ring he’d bought off the bankrupt family of former
Chicago Bears owner George Halas. “Financial problems are sad,
but they’re good news for collectors,” he said, adding he’d
bought, and resold, a second Bears’ ring he after it was pawned by
the son of a team executive, in his words, 'to pay off drug dealers'. Dalen proved a less than Super Bowl quality bidder, winding up only with OJ’s
commemorative NFL Alumni golf umbrella, a snip at $400. That was the
only golf umbrella on auction, but six separate sets of Simpson golf
clubs sold for $2000 or $2250 each. OJ must’ve insisted on one
day of golfing rest.

And of course, there were the OJunkies who had queued for hours to get a place in
the room. Yvonne Adler had attended the civil trial every day for six
weeks, and now wanted to buy something to burn. Priced out of the
early bidding, she tried to pool with three other women, familiar to
each other from the trial, to buy and share a collection of four
crystal awards. But one of the four refused, on the grounds crystal
doesn’t burn.

The usual absentee and telephone buyers were joined by bidders on the
internet. The auction was transmitted live over Yahoo.com, and
featured interactive “real time” bidding, using systems developed
by the Seattle-based LiveBid. LiveBid has already run 40 internet
auctions, selling, among other things, the Batmobile from the movie Batman Returns. CEO Matt Williams, 26, admitted they were doing this
one for the exposure. The question was, for whom? As Williams said, 'the prospect of riding the OJ media whirl
“gave me goose bumps.”

Internet buyers bought three items, and the crush of bidding
threatened to overwhelm Yahoo’s Susan Carls, on the computer in
the auction room. “It’s pretty scientific,” she said modestly.
“The system takes only the highest bid, and automatically
eliminates others. But I was really hoping we’d win the
next-to-the-last item.” An internet buyer had appeared to claim The Washington Pigskin Club’s
Player of the Year trophy, but a late bid from the second room
coincided with auctioneer Scott Bradley’s dropping the hammer. "I
felt it appropriate to allow the bid," said Bradley, who otherwise coped
with the myriad sources with aplomb, to no one's surprise. "Potentially, we can add
millions of bidders, but there’s weren’t really any problems."

The piece de resistence, the Heisman Trophy went by phone to a then-anonymous
buyer for $230,000. Two days later, Philadelphia sheet-metal
wholesaler Tom Kriessman, 47, flew to LA to ante up $255,000
(including tax and comission) for his first-ever sports collectable.
"I bought it for everything it represents," he said. "You
know, the tragedy that was his life." Not to mention his victims.

The sales of OJ’s other tchatkes totaled $152,000. Nicole Simpson’s
father, Lou Brown (see photo top left), watched the sale from the front row. Attorney
Gary Caris announced afterwards that Brown was "very pleased
with the result, but very pleased it was over." They remain
aware that the $382,000 raised represents just over 1% of the
judgement owed the two families, and that’s before the slim and
soft-spoken Mr. Myers’ fees.OJ himself has decamped to Florida, where state law protects more assets against civil judgements.

Ending the post-sale press conference, Butterfield’s George Noceti,
compared the Simpson auction to his past successes with Liberace or
Elvis. And with that, the OJ media circus folded its tents, and
Butterfield’s business resumed, auctioning television and movie memorabilia,
starting appropriately enough with costumes from the cult TV show The
Munsters.

The language that
divides us. The People V. O.J. Simpson: The Run Of His Life, was
released to coincide with the TV series, which in America was called
American Crime Story: The Run Of His Life: The People vs O.J.
Simpson. Similiarly, in America the book's primary title was The Run
Of Life. Because OJ's career as a running back (and Hertz airport
hurdler) was probably not something a British audience would recall,
that title was played down. And the vs. was changed to v. because a
British audience wouldn't be able to make that narrative leap either.

You can listen to or
read my essay 'OJ and Our America' which I did for Cultural
Frontline, on the BBC World Service, in my previous posts on this
blog. I did that after seeing the first two episodes of the TV
series, which prompted me to read Jeffrey Toobin's book. In fact, if
you're playing catch-up with the series, I'd suggest you read the
book early on too, because it will give you another picture of the
case and the trial, and put things into context. It's also a great
read. Toobin was writing from the standpoint of a legal observer, and
he takes on the legal issues with the same sort of dramatic drive the
series does, but with much more depth and context. And without actors
to make characters more sympathetic.

The title is a
little misleading. The Run Of His Life is really better applied to
the famous Bronco chase, a run where he eventually turned and went
the wrong way before being brought down in his own driveway. The
trial was really the run of their lives for many of the other people
involved: in a bigger sense, OJ might have been better served had he
followed either of his original plans, of suicide or escape. That was
the moment the trial leapt into the netherworld of celebrity: as
Toobin says 'the world waited to see if O.J. Simpson would blow his
brains out on national TV'. Irony is a major player in the Simpson
case. As Toobin writes, 'only O.J. didn't understand the preeminent place of race in his own defense'. 'I'm not black. I'm O.J.'

Really the title
might have been 'The Indifference To Truth'. Toobin talks of the
shamelessness of Alan Dershowitz, but points out 'shamelessness is a
moral, rather than a legal, concept.' He then quotes Yale Law School
Dean Anthony Kronman on 'the indifference to truth that all advocacy
entails'. He doesn't note the irony of a law school dean assuming the
law's rules apply; outside the world of attorneys (and who knows,
perhaps even inside occasionally) advocacy may pursued via the truth.
Call me naïve and put me on the OJ jury. It's chilling to actually read OJ's 'suicide' note, which begins 'First everyone understand nothing to do with Nicole's murder'. That could be the title of a book too.

Toobin is absolutely
brilliant on the way the defense's case was built on lies, and the
lies built into performance, helped by the inertness of Lance Ito and
the prosecution intent on playing Judy to the defense's Punch. His
was the first piece on the 'race card' in the OJ trial, the strategy
which proved effective, but he doesn't miss the smaller things. Barry
Scheck's fragmentation of the prosecution's overwhelming DNA evidence
was filled with explanations that ere 'fanciful, and some were
silly'. They posited an LAPD that was both 'totally inept and
brilliantly sinister' (this is in Marcia Clark's closing argument in
the TV show. Maybe the glove was enough, but without Scheck's dumping
of a ton of mud in the recombinent waters, it might not have been.

Although the TV
series is based on Toobin's book, much material seems to have been
gleaned from other sources, most notably Larry Schiller's 'as told
to' inside story, which is where, for example, the brilliant scenes
of Johnny Cochran redecorating OJ's house before the jury can see it
is drawn. That he was able to do that speakes volumes about the
ineptitude of Ito's court. Toobin is good on many of the sleazy
tactics, such as deliberately withholding witnesses, but I can recall
others, like swamping the discovery process, that I might have read
in his columns but which aren't in the book.
No matter: Toobin's
book is full of the sort of astounding bits of absurdity that became
the daily fodder for the OJ audience. LA DA Gil Garcetti's press
officer, Suzanne Child's, would wind up 'dating' talk show vampire
Larry King. And at times, like many magazine writers, he has to give the
best lines to his colleagues on the daily beat. Mike McAlary's take
down of Robert Shapiro presenting himself as the hero of the trial was
deflated by Mike McAlary of the New York Daily News, who explained
Shapiro was 'a typical Hollywood invention--a character tan-deep in
make-up and significance'. Toobin also explains elsewhere that Shapiro
drove a Bentley, but it 'was a used
Bentley'. Years ago, when I reviewed Chris Darden's OJ book (you can
link to that here)
I pointed out where Darden said proudly he drove a
Mercedes, but that it was 'only a used Mercedes'. In LA, I said, that
passes for asceticism.

It's also brilliant on the internal battles within
the defense team, particularly Shapiro's exclusion from it as the trial
went along.The best thing about
reading Toobin is to get the small bits that form the basis of the
series' legal argument in more detail, and in tracking the
personalities in more depth. F. Lee Bailey in particular comes off
far worse than Nathan Lane's portrayal, but almost all the TV show's
characters lack the desperate edge that Toobin gives them. And Toobin
ends with a postscript on the civil trial, which took place in Santa
Monica, not downtown, and of course went against OJ. It's a somewhat
better, if less dramatic, but more ironic ending. This is a book to
read regardless of whether you've seen the show or not. Because even
if you don't intend to watch, after you read this, you will.

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk on the BBC World Service's programme Cultural Frontline, tracing the influence and effects of the OJ Simpson trial; you can read my introduction to that in my post of 2 April, or link direct to the programme on Iplayer here; it comes about 14 minutes in. But for the time the show is no longer available, I thought I'd post my working script (with one footnote) here.

The essay was prompted by the showing of American Crime Story: The People vs O.J. Simpson on BBC television. As the series has now concluded, and I am about to write about it, and about the re-issue of Jeffrey Toobin's book about the trial, I thought this bigger picture might be instructive...

OJ AND OUR AMERICA

Was
it really two decades ago? Watching The People Vs. OJ Simpson
transported me back to that summer of 1994. After a stressful day in
charge of the host broadcast of the opening match of the FIFA World
Cup, I'd ordered room service in my hotel to watch the NBA basketball
finals, when the infamous white Bronco driven by OJ's friend AC
appeared in a box in the screen's lower third. Soon, the basketball
was relegated to the box, then it disappeared, as the strange freeway
convoy disguised as a police chase took centre stage. It was
presented just like sports coverage, because America's new national
pastime was television, and OJ gave TV everything it could desire.

It
was billed as the 'crime of the century', or the 'trial of the
century', but almost every decade in America produces at least one of
those. It actually was the television event of the past century, but
re-seeing it today generates far more than nostalgia. The Simpson
trial balances on two great axes: race and celebrity, and it is both
history and prediction. It is America defining itself, by its
unending racial schism, and re-defining itself, as Andy Warhol
foresaw, by celebrity.

The
mini-series sets the scene with the brutal beating of a black man,
Rodney King, by white Los Angeles police four years earlier, and the
massive riots which followed the cops' acquittal on criminal charges.
This signals the first crucial theme: the show dissects the way
Simpson's defense was based on the disconnect between black and white
Los Angeles. White America believed stars like OJ transcended race;
prosecutor Marcia Clark wisecracks that a jury of OJ's peers would
actually consist of 'middle aged white millionaires'. Black Americans
saw it differently.

The
narrative of OJ being framed by cops who resented his wealth and
fame, hated his having a beautiful white ex-wife, recalled
the Jim Crow era when
'uppity blacks' might be lynched for 'recklessly eyeballing' a white
woman. Whites saw OJ as a world apart from Rodney King, but OJ's lawyerJohnny
Cochrane knew they had one crucial thing in common, their skin; actorCourtney
Vance milks every nuance of racism perfectly.

Twenty-two
years later, America has a black president, and something like 20 per
cent of the country believes he's a foreign-born Moslem educated in
terrorist cells. It's impossible not to feel the embers of prejudice
smouldering, waiting to be blown into flames by the next police
killing of an unarmed black man.

Race
was the strategy, but the trial was defined by celebrity. OJ had
always received special treatment from the police and district
attorneys in LA. It was easy to see why: when I met OJ while covering the 1992 Barcelona Olympics;, his
charisma was overpoweringly physical: he's big in a way Cuba Gooding, the actor playing him on TV,
cannot convey, yet moved gracefully with a chiselled handsomeness and
easy smile. In the face of his celebrity, the prosecution pulled on
kid gloves, but the money and sheer weight of numbers of the defense
team pounded every concession into a submission. Judge Lance Ito
preened for the cameras even as his head sunk beneath the quicksand; Clark and her assistant prosecutor Chris Dardensaw
TV punditry in their futures.

The
mini-series plays the celebrity card knowingly, by highlighting OJ's
friend Bob Kardashian, played with his trademark insecurity by David
Schwimmer. Typically, there’s no mention of the garment bag
Kardashian removed from OJ’s house, with whatever crucial evidence
it contained (NOTE: This comment was premature. The bag did feature later, as Kardashian and AC opened it together to discover it contained nothing incriminating. That moment signalled the show's almost total acceptance of a changed Kardashian, Schwimmer being a character far more sympathetic. But I wonder.) Because what’s more important is that OJ was
godfather to Kardashian's oldest daughter, Kim, and there follows a
series of knowing winks at the soon-to-be-famous-for-being-famous
sisters.

The Kardashian phenomenon was,
in effect, enabled by the Simpson trial. It brought together the new
world of 24 hour news and multi-channel television in a perfect
storm, creating a parallel universe in which the trial became a
catalyst for endless argument, speculation, innuendo, and punditry,
full of cliché and sophistry, all about style and process, not about
substance.

This
legacy haunts us today. Not just in the morass of trash television,
but in the trash television that has been the two-year cycle of the
American presidential elections—an endless series of so-called
debates in which nothing is debated, filling countless hours of
airtime. Donald Trump, most of whose supporters believe that Barack
Obama is a foreign terrorist, steps seamlessly from awarding pretend
jobs on scripted reality shows, to playing a candidate in an endless
reality show. Indeed,
his candidacy would not be possible were it not for the OJ trial.

The
primary voters themselves are like the jurors in a series of OJ
trials, distracted by the big money dream teams of consultants who
make TV commercials, believing in the celebrities they know from TV,
and unable to escape the inflammatory rhetoric that invokes that
shadowy cloud of ever-present racial divide. The Simpson trial
created the Kardashians and empowers the Trumps; it is the template
for today's America, glued to its TV screens, understanding nothing.

Monday, 18 April 2016

I met Nana Vasconcelos once. I was flying to Oslo in June of 1987 to cover the Dream Mile and Bislett Games for ABC Sports. As I got onto the plane in London, I could smell the guy in front of me, and hoped he didn't sit next to me. He was with a couple of others, one of whom took the seat next to mine; the other two moved a row back on the other side of the aisle. I looked around and realised I was sitting with Jan Garbarek; across the aisle were Eberhard Weber (at whom I had turned my nose down) and Nana Vasconcelos. They making a connection back to Oslo after a tour performance.

I went into fan boy mode, something I wouldn't do a few days later at the track meet. As it happened I was carrying my latest chapbook/pamphlet of poetry, Mucho Mojo, from Northern Lights, and it contained poems based on songs of Weber's (and Keith Jarrett's, but not Garbarek's!). I later sent Garbarek another pamphlet with a couple of his songs on it--'send it to Jan Garbarek, Oslo, it will get to me' he said. I got all three to sign the pamphlet, talked with Garbarek a lot and Weber a little, and barely to Nana. In truth, he seemed so laid-back as to be flying metaphorically. I just looked at that pamphlet again: his signature has a joyful little star over it; not dotting any 'i', just his exuberance.

He was a great percussionist, who fit in beautifully to the textures of the Garbarek band. Here's a link to them performing in France a few years later, with Rainer Bruninghaus on keyboards, it's wonderful. I can't recall who the pianist was on that flight; I think it was Bugge Wesseltoft, but it might have been Lars Jansson. Whoever it was was, he was sitting in coach, while we were in business; Garbarek joked that was because he was Swedish.

It wasn't just Garbarek, of course. Nana played with almost all the great ECM musicians, and he also made his own records for the label. He was not just an accompanist: with voice and percussion he could lead and provide his own polyrhythm section. Sometimes I think his best music comes in collaboration with Egberto Gismonti; look for the early ECM record Saudades, but here's a link to a tune, Bianco, from their 1994 record Duaz Voces, linked here. Or go backwards, to his work with Milton Nascimento, or Gato Barbieri, or Gilberto Gil. I know I did after that short plane ride, which was a real highlight of my ABC Sports career. RIP Nana.

Sunday, 17 April 2016

I talked about David
Lean's 1952 film The Sound Barrier on last week's Americarnage
(you can link to it here; it's episode 211, in the '3 Points' section
early on). What I didn't mention was I actually think I'd seen the
film before; when I was 7 or 8 years old, at my uncle's summer camp.
I can't be sure: I remember Run Silent Run Deep; The Harlem
Globetrotters Story; The Jackie Robinson Story
and Jim Thorpe: All American more clearly, but as soon
as it started I felt a familiarity, a sense I might have seen it (as I did,
perhaps a couple of years later, Pork Chop Hill, in the great
hall up there in New Hampshire) but the realization came of how strange it
must have been, and, now that I have lived in this country nearly 40
years, how strange the film may seem to a younger generation.

The Sound Barrier
has just been re-released on DVD, in a version restored by the
BFI National Archive and Studiocanal, with funding from the David
Lean Foundation. Watching the modest interview which appears as an
extra, I learned this was Lean's personal favourite among his films,
which might come as a surprise, given his enduring fame for his early
adaptations and later epics. But it was a project he put together
himself, out of fascination with the story of trying to break the
speed of sound, and its concern echo some of his other films.

I thought first of
In Which We Serve, another film I think of as an 'anti-epic',
in that it tells an epic story by bringing it down to a personal one,
and it emphasises sacrifice rather than triumph. That film was Noel
Coward's personal project, and he brought Lean in, much as Lean and
Alexander Korda brought in Terrence Rattigan to write the screenplay
for The Sound Barrier.

The story's based on
the story of Geoffrey DeHavilland, who lost two sons testing his
experimental jet, and its early focus is on John Ridgefield, the
aircraft manufacturer played by Ralph Richardson, and test pilot Tony
Garthwaite, played by Nigel Patrick, who marries Ridgefield's
daughter Susan (Ann Todd). Denholm Elliott is the son being pushed to
fly, although he's not very good at it, and John Justin is Philip
Peel, Tony's wartime buddy who becomes his fellow test pilot.

It's a film about
ambition and loss, about obsession and challenge, with the fabric of
an almost Learish family dominance about it. Richardson plays that
classical motif in a most understated way. He won a BAFTA as best
actor, and also the New York Film Critics Award, but became the first
actor not to double the New York award at the Oscars. His
performance, in its theatricality, puts him at a tangent to the rest
of the cast, who are being more natural—but this is English natural
in the 1950s, and hence extremely stiff and almost self-conscious,
particularly in its concessions to film glamour, particularly the
ritual lighting of cigarettes: the contrast makes Richardson's work
more powerful. It's a little odd that Joseph Tomelty as Will Sparks,
the engineer figure who is the equivalent of Frank Whittle, whose
engine design enabled the breaking of the sound barrier, is played
with a characteristic Irish comic relief, as if this were a John Ford
film.

This is the part of
the film modern audiences may not quite get; this stiffness. Justin
is like a prototype Peter O'Toole, with none of the animism; Todd,
whose marriage to Lean (his third of six) finally broke during this
filming, often seems to be suffering more off-stage than on. In
contrast, Dinah Sheridan, as Peel's wife Jess, seems the most natural
character in the film. There's an odd scene where Patrick takes Todd
for lunch in Cairo: it's a travelogue celebrating the wonder of a
four-hour trip to Egypt; only after lunch does he remember he has no
way to get back to Britain, having delivered the plane he was
flying—this leads to a short commercial, as it were, for BOAC. The
Cairo scene concludes with Jess (see right) accepting that Peel will soon go back
to Britain to join Tony as a test pilot; the flying doesn't seem to
have lessened Susan's fear of the air.

The story, of
course, is fictionalised, and gets around the ultimate problem that
it was Chuck Yeager, in America, who broke the sound barrier (you
could look at that portion of The Right Stuff as the more
overstated yet underplayed version of this film), but Lean solves
that problem in style, because it is the personal challenge which is
what finally must be overcome, finding the key to controlling the jet
airplane. This allows the movie to triumph even if they never
actually say the barrier is broken, and reinforces the film's
interior epic concerns.

You might think
those an awkward fit with Rattigan, but if anything the family drama
is more powerful than the aerial challenge. The somewhat unsung hero
here is cinematographer Jack Hildyard, who works in different styles,
sometimes suggesting film noir, sometimes a deep-focus trapped
feeling, sometimes a tumultuous background. Obviously there's a lot
of second unit work which is very good, and there one's lovely visual
metaphor that goes unremarked: when Peel watches a swallow diving, as
if giving him the clue to piloting; I was sure he would credit his
feathered friend for the advice. Malcolm Arnold's
score is a mix of sometimes overdone cliché and sometimes wonderful
emotional background: there are a number of passages of something
sounding like a theremin in which I could hear echoed any number of
Sixties British TV dramas.

In Lean's films we
are often engrossed by the struggle within being played out on a
grander stage, certainly it's the core of Lawrence Of Arabia,
Bridge On The River Kwai and Doctor Zhivago, the three
epics which took nearly 20 years of his career, where the stage seems
to run away with the interior conflicts. In that sense, we might see
The Sound Barrier as a bridge between Brief Encounter or the
Dickens films and those grander scale movies, and understand well why
Lean loved it so much.

Thursday, 7 April 2016

My obituary of Earl
Hamner is up at the Guardian online, you can link to it here. It shoud be in the paper paper soon. The focus of the
obit, of course, is The Waltons. I mentioned that the show appeared just as Fred Silverman was cutting all the country
programming that had been so popular, and his instincts, while
perhaps not quite perfect (since many of those shows continued to do
well in syndicated re-runs) were accurate as far as The Waltons went.
The family were the antithesis of the Beverly Hillbillies, but the
show's success ran deeper than that.

America was coming out of the
Sixties into a 'me' decade whose lifestyle conflicts presaged the
present day even more than the Sixties did. The Waltons may have
reminded younger people about the realities of their parents' own
childhoods; there was a sense among many in those times that while
they may have been rebelling against society, per se, they did not
actually hate, or want to be estranged from their families.

It also had a fairy-tale sort of verisimilitude, because it was Hamner's own life as he idealised it, or as he wanted it to be. If you doubt this, take a look at how much Richard Thomas, as the eldest son John-Boy, resembled the young Hamner.

The isolated
world of Walton's Mountain in the Thirties was a surprisingly liberal place,
something signalled by Will Geer, blacklisted actor, singer, Communist
and activist—who created a garden at the American Shakespeare
Theatre in the town next to the one where I grew up. Grandpa, had
seeded leadership to his son, played by Ralph Waite, a former social
worker and divinity student; who after The Waltons would run for
Congress as a Democrat and lose three times. The Waltons preached
tolerance, equality, and responsibility—it may have been
sentimental but it was easy to feel its heart was in the right place.

The adult leads were
fine: Michael Learned was the saintly mother, Ellen Corby brilliant
as the crochety grandma. The children were a bit too clean, too
glowing, too nice and nowhere near dusty enough for farm children,
but you could almost believe in them as country folk. All that is,
except for Mary Ellen, the oldest girl; Judy Norton-Taylor, who
played her, sounded like she'd walked out of a house in suburban
California in 1969.

I also mentioned
that Hamner's adaptation of Charlotte's Web was excellent; I watched
it any number of times when Nate was little, and it was guaranteed to
move me. Hamner was certainly sentimental, but when he was on at
least it was a strength. And sentiment often appeals to the cynics
among us.

Wednesday, 6 April 2016

A few loose ends I wonder about, after watching the final episode of The Night Manager.

1. Why does no one
except Youssef recognise Jonathan Pine when he goes back to the hotel
where he was the night manager? Lots of turnover?

2. How do the 28 truck drivers hired by the arms buyers all know when to leave the trucks just before they blow up? How could they know when Pine would detonate them? Do all of them work with the revolutionaries? Would none of them mention to their actual bosses there are bombs in the trucks?Were they just lucky?

3. How does Pine
walk through a swimming pool while drowning Freddie Hadid, then
return to the hotel with his trousers not only dry but still pressed?

4. How will the
Hadid family react to Freddie's death? Especially as Pine is the one
who left the casino with him and thus the last person he was seen with before he died?

5. The big one: To
whose account did Pine transfer the $300,000? His own? As a baby
shower gift for Angela Burr? To pay for Jed's kid?
6. Is Tom Hiddleston really just a personal trainer'd version of Franchot Tone? More 'Toned' as it were?
7. Why wasn't Pierce
Brosnan driving the paddy wagon that takes Roper away?

Monday, 4 April 2016

I have to say that, until he died, I hadn't realised Bob Ellis had written Newsfront, one of my favourite movies, and one of the best of the Australian New Wave in the late 70s. It holds a special place for me because it's set among the world of newsreel cameramen in the late Forties and early Fifties, and the great Bill Hunter plays a cameraman committed to his craft, to loyalty, and to fairness. It's set in changing times, as newsreels are being squeezed aside by the growing presence of television, and Hunter's commitment is being challenged by his more upwardly-mobile brother (played by Gerard Kennedy). The film ends at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956, where Hunter happens to be the only camera at the water polo match between the Soviets and Hungary; this literal bloodbath has become legendary in Olympic history.

The movie resonated with me because I was working for UPITN, one of the television news agencies, which was a direct descendant of the Fox Movietone News newsreel agency. Many of our execs, cameramen around the world, and staff had worked for newsreels, and the news gathering ethos was the same. The competition, in our case with the BBC-run Visnews, was almost as cut-throat as that in Newsfront; I can't count the number of exclusives stolen by 'accident' or false claims by our more influential rival over the years.

Hunter's attitude represented a certain kind of Australian egalitarianism which I could even then recognise, and it was overtly Labour, and it's made easy to follow because Hunter's often instructing his assistant, an English emigre played well by Chris Haywood, and the conflicts also play out with his wife, whom he's married because his colleague whom he loves (Wendy Hughes) is more taken with his brother. It mixes the personal with parallels in social commentary, and it does it well.

I didn't know about Bob Ellis. Mostly because I doubt his name was on the credits of the movie when I saw it in London; it had been cut considerably by director Philip Noyce and producer David Elfeck, and he'd had himself removed from the credits (he was later restored). Reading his obits, he was a notorious over-writer, wanting to include lots of detail and what was described as polemic. When he won a Writers Guild award for the script for the mini-series True Believers, he clutched the statue and told the producer '' you turned War and Peace into Peyton Place'.'

He also wrote I can't claim much knowledge about Ellis' career; was a playwright, film director, political writer, and critic, but I recommend reading his obituaries, because he's is exactly the kind of wonderful combination of charm, wit, inappropriateness, and belligerence we often associate with Aussies, and he grew into a gruff but loveable sort of curmudgeonly elder statesman status. He predicted the rise of Tony Abbott, and lost a slander suit brought by Abbott and his treasurer Peter Costello, in a wondering throwaway line about them and their wives. So he couldn't be all bad. He's irresistible in Not Quite Hollywood, a documentary about that boom in Australian cinema, all slash and kill and take no prisoners. That was a great era in Australia, which I appreciated from London; not least because Ellis' contemporaries at Sydney University, like Clive James and Germaine Greer, were over here making waves (Les Murray was another there at that time).

I always think of Aussies in two categories: those who rort and those who use the same energies to attack those who do. Ellis strikes me as one in the latter category. I'll probably delve further into his career, even if he did say 'Americans are scum' but maybe he was talking only about Hollywood.

In the meantime, try to see Newsfront. It's a brilliant picture. RIP Bob Ellis

Saturday, 2 April 2016

My discussion of the OJ Simpson trial, prompted by the American Crime Story series, The People vs OJ Simpson: The Run Of His Life, was broadcast today on the BBC World Service's Cultural Frontline programme. You can listen to it on BBC Iplayer here; it starts around 14 minutes into the show. I'm talking about the trial and its attendant media circus, and the knock-on effect it has had on America; the things that connect OJ Simpson to Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Have a listen....

Friday, 1 April 2016

I've done a story for Newstalk Ireland's website about Stef Curry, the Golden State Warriors, and their quest for the best-ever record in an NBA season. You can link to it here. It's really about the way their game combines aspects of the team that holds the mark, the Michael Jordan Chicago Bulls coached by Phil Jackson, with aspects of the Warriors' greatest rivals today, the San Antonio Spurs of Tim Duncan and coach Greg Popovich. Which makes sense, because Warriors' Coach Steve Kerr won three championships with Chicago, and then two more with San Antonio. I'll have to do another one one who actually IS the best team of all-time, as opposed to one with the best record. If the Spurs upset the Warriors in the playoffs, that discussion might become a little easier.

UPDATE: No sooner had the post gone up on Newstalk, than the Boston Celtics went into Oakland and beat the Warriors. Go Celts!